


In the Forest of the Syntax Trees

by Villainyandgoodcheekbones



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Other, also, linguistics everywhere!, linguistics!, so many, so many lines stolen from poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:47:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Villainyandgoodcheekbones/pseuds/Villainyandgoodcheekbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the things that Jean Prouvaire knows:</p><p>Poetry is art.</p><p>There is no such thing as wrong art. Art has no obligation to “mean” any one thing.</p><p>He knows that though lovers be lost, love shall not and that villanelles are harder to write than people think they are.</p><p>He knows the unfinished commentary in front of him is due tomorrow, and that death shall have no dominion beneath the windings of the sea.</p><p>He knows, most of all, that “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is absolute, undiluted, unadulterated bullshit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Forest of the Syntax Trees

i.

These are the things that Jean Prouvaire knows:

Poetry is art.

There is no such thing as wrong art. Art has no obligation to “mean” any one thing.

He knows that though lovers be lost, love shall not and that villanelles are harder to write than people think they are.

He knows the unfinished commentary in front of him is due tomorrow, and that death shall have no dominion beneath the windings of the sea.

He knows, most of all, that “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is absolute, undiluted, unadulterated _bullshit_.

 His despair at this is written in his braid, half-undone, and the constellation in ink marks on his temple where he’s been tapping his pen against it and a long, drawn-out sigh, almost a snarl. Combeferre looks at him over the top of a textbook with an expression of faint concern. “Something the matter?”

Jehan looks back with eyes full of bewildered hurt, and grits out “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. And it’s _deafening._ ” Jehan grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes until he can see stars bloom and fade behind the skin of his eyelids. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, to be fair, it was never supposed to. It was only to prove a point.  Although the rest of Chomskyan syntactic theory isn’t exactly clear either, so. Can I ask what made you start studying it?”

Jehan raises his head from his hands and says loftily “Who pays any attention to the syntax of things?” and glares. “Kisses are a better fate than wisdom, and _that”_ His ballpoint is a sword’s point, stabbing at the list of quotations in front of him, “that is not E.E. Cummings. I have a commentary on imagery due tomorrow, and this line does not make sense. Because it’s not meant to make sense?” Jehan’s upturned chin and his curved-down lips say ‘what does syntax have to do with this’

Combeferre lays his book down with one of his soft laughs and asks, eyebrows arched above his glasses “Do you _want_ me to explain?”

So Combeferre tells him about the difference between the way things are put together and the things they mean, (and the list of things you can only get away with if you’re Noam Chomsky) about nodes and daughters and alignments.

Jehan finishes his commentary, and that night he dreams of syntax trees. They have the papery black-white bark of birches, and they grow like Banyan trees, spreading branches, dropping node after node down to the ground.

ii.

These are the things Jean Prouvaire knows:

To bear the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

Charles Baudleaire offers wine, poetry, or virtue to be drunk on. 

Charles Baudelaire never tasted strawberry vodka. Nor did he ever meet Grantaire and Feuilly and Bahorel. If the Trench-coat Brigade had ridden into the Valley of the Death, Tennyson would’ve written a _very_ different poem. Although he might have had difficulty finding a way to make “punched a cannon” scan.

But the Trench-coat Brigade is playing Faust, off to raise hell elsewhere, and Musichetta has taken her boys back home, and Courfeyrac has been laid under unbreakable geas to make sure Marius doesn’t get arrested on his way home this time. So charged, he has to follow Marius out, although he does manage to force Enjolras to help him.

Jehan is drunk on strawberry vodka, poetry and virtue. The smooth grain of the table is cool under his cheek and he dreams of trees. They have the papery, white-black bark of birches and someone is tugging on his braid. Jehan looks up.

“You don’t want to sleep like that. Trust me. You wake up, and you’re tired and your cervical vertebrae are trying to kill you.” Combeferre winces and rubs the neck of his neck, remembering. Combeferre _would_ fall asleep at desks, Jehan thinks. He would fall asleep at desks, pillowed on books and loose leaf paper in the grey hours too early to be really morning, but too late to be the night before. Jehan smiles.

“You have a good voice. Teach me something.”

“You’re drunk.”

His head is tilted, bird-like, to one side and Jehan says mildly “So are you.”

Combeferre laughs one of his soft laughs. “Fair enough.  What did you have in mind?” He straddles a chair. Jehan rests his chin on his hands and considers.

“How do you put a word together?”

So Combeferre tells him about plurals and progressives and that  these are morphemes, shapes with meanings in them, strung together. He talks about suffixes and prefixes and infixes and circumfixes, all the ways of inflecting and deriving and fixing things. He talks about cases and alignment and agreement and how the moon is female in French, and male in German and neither one in English. A word, he says, is made of these, shapes with meaning in them.

“And those? What are they made of?”

So Combeferre talks about sounds. Sonorant sounds are the ones you can sing, the a’s and e’s and i’s and o’s and u’s (and ow’s and aw’s, diphthongs and triphthongs and Jehan imagines Courfeyrac’s grin). You can hum a nasal, but they need the space in your sinuses to move out into the air, which is why you can’t say them when you’re sick. Sibilants are the hissing sounds, s’s and sh’s and z’ and zh’s, sisters of friccated f’s and v’s, the reason why, if you turn the news down low, so you can hear the sounds but not the words, all the people sound like so much static and snakes. More than they usually do, anyway. Combeferre talks about stops, like the one right in the middle of his name, and the liquid l’s and w’s in Jollly and Bossuet.

“What about r’s?”

“Rhotic. R is…complicated.” He laughs one of his soft laughs, because they’re both drunk and not sure if he’s still talking about the sound. “Nobody really knows how to define what a rhotic is, and they have habit of…changing the things around them.” He writes their names in a linguist’s hand on a napkin. The symbols (runes?) turn them into something new, definitions or spells.

Enjolras drives Combeferre back to their apartment. Jehan walks home, drifting from pool to pool of yellow sodium light. He is thinking. Sibilants are the hisses of the oracle at Delphi, Sybil of the Greeks, who wrote _rho_ , rhotic. Erotic. E’s and R’s.

 His pillow is cool under his cheek.

Jehan dreams that the moon sings to him in sonorants and liquids, trumpets that sound like waves. The moon is a man and a woman and both and neither, wearing white and silver shapes with meanings in them. The moon has fine-boned hands and the long, hooded eyes of a Byzantine saint.

iii.

These are the things Jehan Prouvaire knows:

Achilles cannot be killed until Hector is killed. He knows that Hector is a good man, but he is going to kill Patroclus, so Jehan cannot help but hate him, just a little.

He knows that you have to find the thing you love, and let it kill you. Charles Bukowksi is somewhat less clear on what you have to do when you love so many things, and so few of them wish you any harm. For now, just for now, all of Jehan’s days are bright red, there is always another apple, but he knows it can’t last. Nothing gold can ever stay.

 

He knows that the _Iliad_ is going to be the death of him.

He knows it going to be the death of him because Patroclus is going to die, and his death will be cheapened, tarnished by dull, dull men and women in tweed who ask him whether Patroclus died in the indicative of the aorist or some other tense, some other mood; was his death imperative, subjunctive, optative? And how can he answer that? Did Patroclus choose to die, or did he have to?

He is going to lash his professors by their heels to the back of a chariot and ride around the lecture halls for days.

Greek does such strange things. All the letters shift with the tenses and the tides and he squeezes his hands together until he can the bones creak (carpals and metacarpals and phalanges, Combeferre tells him) and goes to find Combeferre.

“What are they doing?”

Combeferre peers over the top of his glasses and purses his lips. “Agamemnon and Achilles are arguing and Greeks are being slaughtered in droves. Why do you ask?” There’s a laugh hidden there, a grin in the flash of glass over his eyes even if his lips don’t move.

Jehan toys idly with his braid and his voice is calm, still water as he says “I could drown you in the fountain on the Quad, and they would never believe it was me. Not a single person. What,” he says “are the _letters_ doing?”

So Combeferre tells him that everything changes, even sounds, _especially_ sounds. Nothing gold can ever stay. But the words trip silver from his tongue: assimilation, lenition, elision, which is apheresis at the beginning of a word and ecthlipsis when it ends with “m” and the next word has a vowel at the front (but only in Latin). Assimilation will make a thing match another and lenition weakens it. Elision makes it disappear. And there are geminates, twin sounds doubled up, but only rarely. Vowels especially, are turn-coats and traitors, whole systems shifting from one place to another, pull chains, push chains. Vowels are ropes of pearls sliding between tongue and teeth.

“They dye your tongue.” Combeferre tells him when Jehan asks how anyone knows where a vowel is in your mouth. “They put pigment on it and look to see where it stains.”

Patroclus dies, because he chooses to and because he must.

His body is carried away by angels with names like Apheresis and Lenition. They have tongues of scarlet and silver and blue, tongues of fire. They are twins, and pearls drop from their lips.

 

iv.

Pragmatics, Combeferre tells him, is understanding what people mean even when they say something completely different.

Pragmatics is when ‘It’s cold in here’ means ‘close the window’ or ‘bring me that blanket’

“It’s warm” Jehan says, braid limp and lifeless in the heat. Combeferre draws it aside and breathes cool across the back of his neck. Most of their clothes have already been sacrificed on the altar of “it’s warm.”

This is not pragmatic at all. This might be a very, very bad idea.

Find the thing you love and let it kill you.

And Jehan thinks _la petite mort_. Just a little, little death. It can’t hurt.

Combeferre’s eyes are so much softer without their cool glass shields. Jehan winds his fingers in the short hair at the nape of Combeferre’s neck, where there’s a cowlick that never quite goes away. “Down on your knees, Achilles.” And Combeferre is kneeling then, and lets Jehan tug his head forward.  “Farther down.”

Bilabial consonants are pronounced with the two lips together, and there are sounds Combeferre hasn’t taught him about yet, trills and retroflexes that make your tongue (scarlet and silver and blue) flutter and curl back on itself. Pharyngeal sounds are pronounced far down at the back of the throat. Jehan is learning.

“Ah” is a low vowel, often aspirated, exhaled out with a puff of breath. And Jehan knows this vowel intimately, but there are others, high vowels, and these too are drawn from him, the tense keening of the long e and u. Some vowels are rounded vowels, warm lips wrapped around him. “Oh” is a rounded vowel.

_Oh._

A lesser man, a man not Combeferre might say something then about the language of love, some joke.

Combeferre presses a kiss to the soft skin in the crease of Jehan’s hip and tells him that there are languages in which that you have to indicate how you came to know something with a special marker on the verbs. Others have verbs that can only be reciprocal, you can only do them when they’re shared. Ditransitives are things you do for other people. Jehan makes himself a grammar.

He falls asleep, and it’s good to fall asleep like this, with ankle-bones (“tarsals” murmur the lips pressed to the crown of his head, tarsals and the tips of tibia, fibula) brushing and a long warmth down his spine. Jehan sleeps and dreams of trees.


End file.
